Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday March 31, 2012 @09:27AM
from the end-of-the-line dept.

dartttt writes "Adobe has released Flash Player version 11.2 with many new features. This is the final Flash Player release for Linux platform and now onward there will be only security and bug fix updates. Last month Adobe announced that it is withdrawing Flash Player support for Linux platform. All the future newer Flash releases will be bundled with Google Chrome using its Pepper API and for everything else, 11.2 will be the last release."

About half of youtube works without Flash installed. Other video sites, not so much... blip.tv (which is the other one I use fairly regularly) has actually discontinued their html5 support in favour of going 100% flash.

Ultimately, my choice was between installing Flash and using the browser of my choice, or installing Chrome for Linux. I went with flash, but I am not happy with the decision. It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Am one of those guys who try to make a living out of flash games, and I can tell you that this isn't very good news for us. A couple of months ago, they withdrew flash support for mobile, and now for Linux.
it's like Adobe wants the death of flash.

Really now. I can respect an anti-Flash opinion based on a desire for open standards (even though the SWF format is open), but saying Flash is terrible tech is just me-too ignorance. What other web framework can you composite 2d animation, advanced typography, h264 movies, native sound processing, and a 60fps native 3D rendering engine at your leisure? Try making audiotool [audiotool.com] in HTML5. There's nothing better for creating multimedia content. There are simply no IDEs anywhere near as mature for HTML5. Actionscript 3.0 is a pretty great language, a bit like Java, that encourages good coding style, but without weighing down development speed with too much cruft. It's what Javascript could have been if Microsoft hadn't sabotaged the ECMAScript 4 deliberations.

And what other web framework has let developers deliver quality games? Unity, sure, but most people don't have the plug-in. Go ahead, what do you recommend that people should have used the last 10 years for web-based gaming? Yeah...I thought so.

Even though Adobe is run by fucking morons, Flash is still a great platform, and they are not giving up on Flash completely. I imagine the future of Flash is more of a Unity-style thing where you develop in Flash and then export to various platforms. Epic wouldn't have spent the time and money porting Unreal Engine unless they had confidence in Adobe's roadmap.

As I said, if someone has philosophical differences with Flash as a platform, I can respect that. But all you people mouthing off about Flash without even understanding the issues only do more harm than good.

Yeah...Epic threw the Citadel demo together last year to show at an Adobe event. I assume it's pretty early code and totally unoptimized. Still, those are PS3-quality textures and models, so the RAM footprint isn't going to be tiny.

All you Anonymous Cowards sound like the slashdotters who still think Windows sucks as bad as Win95.

I have a user name, what difference does it make? Doesn't make me any smarter.

If you're talking about a page full of Flash ads, that's because ads are designed under the flawed assumption that they have 100% of resources available.

Applications shouldn't access memory allocated to them, yet we still have memory protection. Some problems can't be helped but Flash makes it very easy to use resources while being a black box with minimal controls.

As for video performance...it might have improved, but I have a pretty good computer right now so I wouldn't have noticed. But I don't think it matters that much anymore: Flash has been annoying for very long and is still the same black box made by the same company. It's a source of security holes which is mostly used for ads and video, and it's not really trusted.

With HTML video capability the choice stands between playing video and playing video with flash. It ultimately becomes a worthless middleman in this application.

Find something new and quick. I suggest HTML5, and finding other tools to develop it in.

Adobe never wanted the death of Flash. They have gone through the 5 stages of grief already. Microsoft, in a little yellow school bus moment, ignored all the signs with their creation of Silverlight and went straight to "Fuck it. We were just kidding anyways".

There were a lot of factors that came together here and Flash simply cannot compete going forward with HTML5. Nobody really wanted a proprietary platform like Flash anyways, it was just all that was available at the time. You could stuff with Java, but that always seemed more geared towards business to me.

Adobe is moving on. While I don't like Dreamweaver (at all), and many developer friends state that the code it produces is lacking, Adobe can create some pretty nice development tools. Look forward to a pretty comprehensive HTML5 development products that you can make your games in.

P.S - It did not help that Steve Jobs refused to put them on Apple products towards the end of his life. Especially with games and content consumption. That was a bad hand dealt to Adobe that just quickened the death of Flash.

Adobe would be very happy for Flash to die. They make their money from the authoring tools, not from the player. The player is a money sink. With HTML5, they can outsource the client development to browser developers but keep the profitable one.

[With HTML5 clients,] Adobe doesn't even have to pay the license fees for distributing the H.264 implementation

How so? I was under the impression that the whole reason for a "video server" was to support frame-accurate seeking and live streaming, both of which require encoding capability. I was also under the impression that HTML5 for Safari on iOS wouldn't take VP8.

A bit of history from this NeXT/Apple alumnus. In 1997 Carbon was brought to the WWDC in San Jose as a one year transitional API for the big boys to port their application base over to and then a rapidly phased move to Cocoa. Adobe, Macromedia and others dictated and delayed a lot of OS X maturity by threats to pulling their products from the platform. Microsoft was settling the legal dispute and contractually bound themselves to OS X but refused to go Cocoa.

Apple had no real leverage until iTunes and the iPod.

Instead of being ready when OS X was released for Cocoa apps these companies kicked and screamed all the way.

They whined even more after Carbon 64 bit didn't materialize. By then Apple had all the leverage they needed and when iOS materialized Adobe was the last and most arrogant one to believe Steve had any love loss left for them and their long-time collaboration from Apple->NeXT->Apple. When he publicly denounced Flash Adobe should have already had their app base moved to Cocoa. The days of complaining how difficult it is to maintain Windows and OS X finally fell on completely deaf ears. Adobe will never recover as a major player and will find itself relegated to a second tier if it doesn't make a bold push on OS X and iOS with actual native Apps from top to bottom that leverage pure Cocoa/GCD/OpenCL/OpenGL/CoreFoundation via C/C++/ObjC/ObjC++ in the truest sense of the world. Releasing PDF as an ISO standard was wise, but one done out of threats from competitors. Adobe still has bloated tools whose pricing is going to kill them faster than their competitors, but then again Adobe really seems to love bundles.

In HTML5, how do I target Internet Explorer for Windows XP, which still has two years of extended support left? It may surprise geeks, but I'm under the impression that some administrators are still a lot more willing to authorize the installation of Adobe Flash Player than of Google Chrome Frame.

In existing HTML5 implementations, how do I make a barcode scanner application or a voice-controlled application? There's still no way to (ask the user's permission to) read the camera and microphone connected t

What nobody wanted was a client side platform that was proprietary, had expensive authoring tools, and was run by Adobe, a company that clearly had no problem using FBI connections to imprison somebody over a Security through Obscurity issue and generally act like insane evil tyrants to protect their IP. It's not really that hard to figure out why a lot of people did not, and still do not like, Adobe as a company, or some of their products.

A barcode scanner application does, as does a voice-controlled application.

I do remember running Java applets from banks

I'll take a guess that any applet from a bank has been digitally signed with a commercial code signing certificate and is therefore allowed to use JNI as opposed to 100% Pure Java. Like ActiveX, JNI allows running native code, but like ActiveX, it requires a commercial code signing certificate that has not expired. This arrangement is fine for banks but not necessarily for student or hobbyist developers. I'm under the impression that

It's very hard to have any technology (proprietary or not) gain traction on the web when it needs to replace an existing solution in order to do so. It must not just be better - it must be significantly better, especially when the existing one is "good enough". It's precisely why HTML5 is struggling hard against Flash in video, and why it took ages for PNG to become a real standard on the web. But it also means that, once H.264 is set - and, largely thanks to Apple, it is a de facto standard for the Web alr

Will Linux users get totally screwed over by this over time, or are there plenty of alternative, non-Adobe plugins to display Flash? How big of a deal is this really? I'm a 100% Linux user, but I can't live without Flash in today's world, unfortunately.

But for everyone else, noscript is going to simply break all modern websites. We need something far better. Something that gives users easy control over what they see and resources used. And do this with minimal breakage of sites and without the user a being a compsci major.

It is possible. I have even had some ideas- mostly centered around limited tight javascript loops designed to short-circuit animation. But it seems there is just not much interest in the community.... yet. I am hoping that will eventually change.

Sorry, Apple (crosses himself to ward of the evil one) has shown that Flash is overrated. Adobe itself already acknowledged defeat on that front and stopped development for mobile devices. Those lucky Android devices that got flash support have it crash or slow the device to a crawl. The mobile device on which regular web pages make sense, tablets, seem to give Android no advantage at all in sales.

Adobe is really shooting itself in the foot here again. Web development is my trade and I have noticed a very high adaptation of Linux in this industry. Not just the obvious servers but desktops as well. A few years ago, if you wanted one, it was a negotiation. Now, I have even seen it as a requirement. Flash is universally despised in the LAMP development area which also seems (but I admit to being prejudiced) to be the place where new things are attempted rather then the 1 millionth intra-net site.

Will this make a huge difference? Not at first but unless a customer absolutely demands flash, I code a requirement in HTML5 and show something that is smoother and better supported and Hey, works on the iPad. So much easier for the initial demo to just hand a tablet to show how nice the site works... especially if you noticed the customer has an iPhone or iPad themselves. And a lot do. I am not convinced the world is moving to the tablet for browsing but the customer does so demoing the product on the product of the future just seems smart to me.

When the iPad (or was it the iPhone itself) launched, a lot of people like the parent claimed that the lack of flash would kill it... I would like a product that gets killed like that. I would dry my tears with million dollar bills.

Adobe got lazy with flash, it is slow, buggy, a resource hog and crashes every two seconds all so that webpages can't be indexed and look like the creation of a 12 year old Japanese girl. It lost support of the people who are capable enough of working around it and now, thank to the evil one, customers are demanding that their site works without it to.

HTML5 is the new thing and with mobile devices becoming bigger and bigger (who would you rather please with your website, an iPad user or a user running IE6, I think I know the bigger sucker... eh, the customer with more disposable income) the finicky, slow websites must go. Have you tried YOUR websites menu with a touchscreen yet?

Well, for VIDEOs you don't need flash. Never did. Of course SOME websites intentionally obfuscated the videos to force you to decode them in flash, but that's not REAL VIDEO. REAL VIDEO has worked for ages without any need for flash. Flash was made to overcome failures of Microsoft IE to deal with video.

As much as I think Flash is *way* overused on the Internet, I would miss it. I watch some videos, though not that much - but when I want to it's nice to have. I also play online games to kill time which I don't NEED, but like. I generally hate Flash, but sometimes you need it. Fortunately, Chrome is an option.

If iOS gets to have an effect, I don't see why desktop linux can't. In this case however, it seems like it would mostly hurt Firefox on Linux. But then again this is in 5 years. 5 years ago, there were a lot more sites with Quicktime, Realplayer, and Windows Media streaming. I barely see them at all today.

If that's true, then why did Adobe create Flash for Linux in the first place?

Sometimes people make thing for Linux without need for large profit. It's good PR and helps the community; However, for most people, when you do something for free and find the recipients to be largely rude and ungrateful, you stop doing it.

The day it reads "Adobe kills Flash" I'll pop the champagne, "for Linux" just means support is going backwards for Linux. No matter how much you hate Flash the effect will be "That doesn't work on Linux/Firefox, use Windows/Chrome." because despite it being supported I bet once Flash 12 comes out most sites will reply "your version of flash is not supported, please upgrade" anyway. Anyone know if this support will be in Chromium too or if it's another Chrome-only feature like H.264?

The day it reads "Adobe kills Flash" I'll pop the champagne, "for Linux" just means support is going backwards for Linux. No matter how much you hate Flash the effect will be "That doesn't work on Linux/Firefox, use Windows/Chrome." because despite it being supported I bet once Flash 12 comes out most sites will reply "your version of flash is not supported, please upgrade" anyway. Anyone know if this support will be in Chromium too or if it's another Chrome-only feature like H.264?

Actually, the communication should go in the other direction and say "Use Web Standards!". Then their videos will work on all modern browsers.

I'm not sure this is actually a loss. I think it's probably a bonus that they'll only be doing fixes and not adding more features. The new features are not likely to be used and generally only end up adding more potential exploits.

If that's what they mean by "withdrawing support", then yes. But I don't think that's what they mean.
From TFA: "Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release".
And then, nothing.

I used to think of Flash as a CPU hog, but it pales in comparison to Javascript/HTML5. Even simple 2D games in Javascript will run at about 3 frames per second despite constantly using 100% CPU, and they often hog memory too (which Flash has never been all that bad about in my experience, unless you leave a dozen YouTube tabs open or something).

Annoying ads won't go away just because Flash does; they'll move to HTML5 and will be just as annoying, more resource hungry, and harder to block (disabling Javascript everywhere makes the Web unusable; a whitelist system like NoScript is going to be a necessity).

I used to think of Flash as a CPU hog, but it pales in comparison to Javascript/HTML5

You're comparing apples and oranges there. You are not comparing Adobe Flash to JavaScript + HTML5, you are comparing Adobe Flash to an (unspecified) implementation of JavaScript + HTML5. This may seem like nitpicking, but it's very important. For example, on OS X Safari is a lot faster than FireFox for anything involving lots of compositing, but on Windows the converse is true.

More importantly, the people who get the blame for poor performance can actually fix it with HTML5. When Flash was slow on OS X, people blamed Apple, but Apple was a small share of the market that Adobe didn't care about, and Apple couldn't do anything to fix it. Adobe has very little incentive to improve Flash performance - they don't make money selling the client. In contrast, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google all use their JavaScript performance as a selling point for their browsers. If a Flash game is too slow on a user's machine, what can they do? Not play it. Unless they actually tell the author, they may not realise that they've lost a potential user. If they do, will the author pass the complaint to Adobe? Probably not. In contrast, if a web game is too slow in Firefox, the user can try it in Chrome. If it's faster, then Firefox probably just lost a user...

I think Mozillas stance on this Pepper/NaCL thing is quite bad founded. What Google have done is essentially to technicaly sandbox plugins (giving them about the same security as Javascript) and with that made a new and improved plugin API. This is not a bad thing. It of course might keep developers from HTML/JS and instead use C/C++/Any language you can think of. I really don't see how this is a bad thing either. It's pretty much proven by now that HTML/JS will never get native speeds, Chrome already have it. Compare Airmech on chrome with that mozilla MMORPG released this week and you will see for yourself. Airmech looks modern, the Mozzila game is a litte better than NES quality.

The problem with pepper is that it is a code dump, now moved to the chromium repository, it isn't an spec, behaviour changes every time Google updates it. If Mozilla were to waste waste resources to allow more closed plugins infect the web at least gives them a spec, if every browser embed the same code, then why have different browsers?

This is the same reason why WebQL died as an standard, the spec said: must follow Sqlite version x.y as the SQL dialect., or something like that. Mozilla and Microsoft rejected that because it force an implementation

Is there any reason the Gnash team cant step up and improve Gnash and make it as good as Flash? Or at least good enough that it can be a drop-in replacement for Flash?

Does Gnash support RTMPE streams? Maybe what is needed is a fork of Gnash (or a bolt-on for Gnash) hosted in a country without anti-circumvention laws that supports RTMPE and other flash DRM. (similar to how many projects have had and continue to have sites outside the US for the development and distribution of encryption software to avoid str

Adobe will continue to make new versions of the Flash Player that use the new PEPPAPI (Pepper API). They will no longer make any new versions of the plugin that support the older NSAPI model. PEPPAPI was created by Mozilla and Google, but since PEPPAPI was introduced, Mozilla decided to not support it ("it is too hard").

I was about to say to stop the bad summaries, but this is/. , and this is what we have come to expect.

Adobe, your web programs (Flash and PDF Reader) have been a pox on computer users everywhere even if they are not aware of the risks. I hope you will entirely give up on the Internet and concentrate on software where they will do no harm. Better yet, just leave the business entirely.

I've included Swfdec, but as I understand it, this is for flash apps that you have created and know work with swfdec. It is not for random content from unknown sources. A use case for this is a kiosk where you control the content and the display.

Now, are the other two, Gnash and Lightspark, ready for primetime, i.e. can they replace Flash Player any time soon?

Personally, the last time I used either one was a few months ago when I toyed with the idea of trying to make my workstation fully open source. I found that many youtube videos made the plugin crash for both Gnash and Lightspark.

Since there is content right now that is made for Adobe's Flash Player, I feel that the way forward should be to stop creating new content for Flash. Let it die, and only create new content in HTML5. As for the existing content, the alternatives like the ones listed above need to be able to play need to be able to play it with no problems. I would even have no problem if there was new content developed with the alternative in mind rather than close source Flash Player.

This is not yet an alternative at least not for all users. I'm using Lubuntu and Chromium on a netbook and a very old PC and on both systems the playback with the HTML5 player is choppy and the sound recently stutters and lags. Up until about two weeks ago any version of Chrome and Chromium would simply crash all the video tab renderers on loading the YT HTML5 player. Also other sites like revision3.com won't even begin to display content in HTML5. There is some serious work to be done across platforms to make this a viable alternative. I've been begging for flash to die for years but if this is the near future I have to consider getting a windows install just to watch internet videos or (semi-legally) download even more video source files which is inconvenient.

Here's a link to a MPlayer YouTube script [multimedia.cx] which also allows playing on the fly. It uses youtube-dl as a helper to fetch the exact video location URL from which MPlayer starts buffering.

Now we just need a Firefox/Chrome extension to make a nicely clickable button which passes the browser URL to the script. One problematic thing here too is that while MPlayer can seek, it does seem to not know the length of the video, so I don't know the current position.

One problem I've always had w/ Adobe Flash - regardless of platform - is that the storage that one can set aside for a downloading video is at the most 10MB, and after that, one's only choice is unlimited. There is no way I'm going to select unlimited, but in this age of TB of HDD and GB of RAM, it's really antiquated of Adobe to have nothing b/w 10MB and entire disk. Least I expect from this is to allow 1GB of HDD to be allowed, so that the downloads are faster.

Actually, there was a Linux flash player since version 6... The support hasn't always been good or well-synced with the Windows/MacOS releases, but it has existed for quite a long time. 64-bit support has only been available since version 10 or so.

All of my machines "lack" Flash, except the one built into Chrome. That includes my Mac and Windows machines, also, not just my Linux machine. Of course, I don't consider that to be a problem, it's deliberate.

Sorry friend, Adobe killed those too. Mark my words and mark them well, all those that are celebrating the "death of flash"? Boy are YOU gonna be buttfucked.

You see Adobe was paying for YOUR H.264 license fees, guess who is gonna pay for that now? That would be nobody, that's who. And mark my words MPEG-LA is gonna make SCO look like the Care Bears, in fact if the rumors are true they will be able to pretty much lock anybody but the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, out of Internet content, how? DRM. Rumor is H.265 will support protected path and HDMI which means it'll be a DMCA violation if you even attempt to reverse engineer it.

So mark my words, Google WILL end up "pulling a TiVo" when it comes to Android, because if it don't they won't be able to play H.265 videos on their phones. Apple and MSFT of course won't care, they'll pay their $699 license fee, so who does that leave out in the cold? Why that would be Linux, which nobody is gonna want if it can't play the latest videos.

To me the sad part is it could have been avoided if all those supposedly "pro freedom" website developers would have stood up to Apple and said "We are NOT gonna support your devices until you support a FOSS codec as a baseline standard" but instead everyone saw the crazy money iShiny users were spending and went apeshit. Now you watch, within 5 years articles will be saying "What happened? Why did the web end up locked down to a three way split?" and it will simply be because everyone was stupid, they turned on the company that did not care if you distributed and even didn't give a shit if you made a FOSS knockoff, and instead embraced a company made of patent trolling, simply because the great and powerful Jobs said it will be thus.

Rumor is H.265 will support protected path and HDMI which means it'll be a DMCA violation if you even attempt to reverse engineer it.

What business does a codec have with digital restrictions management technologies? I thought that was the province of the container. The only time I've ever seen an interaction between a codec and DRM has been BD+, in which the encoder can warp portions of a video to make them easier to encode, and then code on the disc running in a VM can refuse to unwarp them if the playback environment doesn't meet basic spot checks.

No one with modern hardware should need to pay any additional H.264 licensing fees, because the video hardware already supports decoding the bitstream. This has been the case for all PC video devices except the crappy Atom integrated chipset for about 5 years, and is the case with all current smartphone/tablet chipsets. The license fees were already paid by the hardware vendor. All software has to do is send the bitstream to the driver via the correct API. No use of H.264 patents in the software, no license fees.

It doesn't necessarily have to be the end of free as in free as beer, but worst case scenario it is, sure. You might as well be complaining that mozilla has to pay for bandwidth for everyone to download the browser from their site, or grab add-ins. That isn't free either. They'll just pay the license fee out of the revenue they get from google for having them as their default search engine. Whoopee.

Not all "FOSSies" are clueless, they just aren't just aren't as a religious zealot about not using h.264 as you are. They are actually fairly smart about doing what's best for themselves, usually. If you actually studied most of the technologies in h.264, VP8, WMV, etc, you'd realize if a patent likely applies to one, would apply to them all. The open source codecs aren't all that different from the proprietary ones that they would likely escape either.

And yes, I would consider your post to be TROLLING, as it really didn't do anything but complain and spread FUD.

Pointing out a patent troll is a patent troll is FUD? can I have some of what you are smoking please?

That would be like screaming TROLL when someone says "Rambus is a patent troll". Actually its even worse than that as Rambus did make the occasional product whereas the ONLY reason MPEG-LA exists is to troll, that's it. they don't make any tech, pay for any research, they are a pile of patents gotten together to make sure everyone in the pool gets a cut from their trolling without having their own names bei

You have some very strange views my friend. MPEG-LA exists so that something reasonable could be done about all the patents that are involved with specific codecs, and people who wanted to license it could do so from one place rather than dozens. I'm not sure how that is considered being a troll, but apparently having to actually pay for stuff means "troll" to you.

As for something that MPEG-LA did that was friendly and/or supportive of FOSS (although I wonder why it's all about FOSS with you). Here: http [mpegla.com]

I've already been modded down, so I didn't think I needed to comment again, but reading TFA it seems that Adobe is completely abandoning Flash development on Linux. However, Google is now going to be responsible for Flash in Chrome. Given that Chrome runs on Android and Google has a source license to Flash, I wouldn't be surprised if they keep supporting it in Android too. Flash support is one of the major advantages Android has over iOS, so I'd be surprised if they abandoned it...

They probably want Hulu to "fail", because then they can say, "We tried but it didn't work," and then push people to their own, private platforms with individual subscription fees--or make deals with ISPs to raise rates and bundle subscriptions that don't count against bandwidth quotas.

I think our best alternative is to just do something else. Make our own TV shows, or don't watch TV altogether. Life goes on.

They probably want Hulu to "fail", because then they can say, "We tried but it didn't work," and then push people to their own, private platforms with individual subscription fees--or make deals with ISPs to raise rates and bundle subscriptions that don't count against bandwidth quotas.

But they've been doing that, and every effort appears to have failed. Part of that problem is they olny offer they're own media, or can't come to good enough agreements with each other. Again the lincensors are too greedy I think.

Hulu ARE the copyright holders. They're 90% owned by NBC, FOX and ABC, so of course they have no negotiating power with their masters. It's why everything with Hulu sounds like a great idea at first, and is then immediately crippled by draconian DRM and advertising idiocy.